This week's What We're Reading is curated by Sridhar Gutam, Senior Scientist, Indian Council of Agricultural Research and Nidhi Sharma, Research Specialist, Stanford University. Nidhi Sharma is a researcher in Dominique Bergmann's lab at Stanford University. She graduated from The University of…

The June 2017 issue of Plant Physiology is a Focus Issue on stomata; here is the editorial overview to this issue by Michael R. Blatt, Plant Physiology, Editor-in-Chief, and Tim J. Brodribb and Keiko U. Torii, Plant Physiology Editors. Small Pores with a Big Impact The guard cells surrounding stomatal…

An NPR interview with Alan Alda about his efforts to help scientists learn to communicate. "People are dying because we can't communicate in ways that allow us to understand one another," he writes. "It sounds like an exaggeration, but I don't think it is. When patients can't relate to their doctors…

Author Katherine Wu highlights some of the challenges that interfere with scientists communicating. She says, "Both scientists and non-scientists must commit to not only communication, but also a drastic reassessment of how we communicate with each other. I believe mending the rift starts with…

The Science Show on Radio National, Australia, interviewed Robert Furbank, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis, Australian National University, on efforts to engineer C4 photosynthesis into rice. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/turbo-charging-crops-to-feed-the-billions/8541396

Special Issue: Legumes – From Food Security to Climate Change The April issue of J. Exp. Bot is a special issue on Legumes. The Editorial introduction, by Considine et al. (10.1093/jxb/erx099) observes that grain legumes “will form a cornerstone of future food and nutritional security and a global…

Here's a fascinating plant in honor of Fascination of Plants Day #PlantDay By Tim Low, published in Australian Geographic AUSTRALIA HAS A PARASITE believed to be the largest in the world, a tree whose greedy roots stab victims up to 110m away. The Christmas tree (Nuytsia floribunda) has blades…